Ben Lerner: 'Once you start writing the language has its own ideas...'

Poet Ben Lerner turned to fiction recently with the experimental mediation on the life of a writer lost in a foreign land. Leaving Atrocha Station is a quiet, poetic work of compelling beauty and power. We spoke to Ben about 'thisness' in fiction, experimentation and what exactly is the 'anti-novel novel'.

Having written poetry for so long, what made you sit down and write a novel?

I don't really know. I'd recently finished a book of poems and an essay on John Ashbery's poetry. The ideas stirred up by those projects were still with me but I felt like I needed a break from writing poetry and critical prose. I guess I became interested in how I could place those concerns-my ideas about poetry, about aesthetic experience, etc.-in the mind and personality of a character and watch them spread out into other areas of his life. But even that sounds too deliberate, as if I were in control. Once you start writing the language has its own ideas, starts pulling you away from whatever you thought you were sitting down to do.

The book very much holds the thisness of moments all throughout its narrative. What is your favourite record of haecitas (apols for spelling - it's been a while since my A levels) in literature?

That's an interesting question. I think Gertrude Stein and Ashbery are two writers who make me feel the thisness of language itself; they narrate the thisness of narrative. In 1957 Ashbery wrote a review Stein's Stanzas in Meditation in Poetry. He says her work 'gives one the feeling of time passing, of things happening, of a plot, though it would be difficult to say precisely what is going on'. Both Stein and Ashbery manage to capture the texture of time as it passes. They don't just describe events; they allow you to experience language itself as an event. 'It is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their "way of happening"'. That's also true of Ashbery. He once said he was interested in 'the experience of experience' -not just this experience, but the thisness of experience.

There are elements of the book that are very much anti-novel in that they subvert expectations of a tradition novel form. Would you agree and what led to this choice?

I think the tradition of the novel is 'very much anti-novel'- it's a form that's always undermining itself. Think of Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy, the wonderful instability of those books. This is built into the contradiction of the name-how do you have a tradition of the new? So I agree, but I'd also note that troubling the conventions of the novel is conventional.

I'm not interested in most contemporary 'realistic fiction' that denies its own artifice and tries to reduce the messiness of reality to neat geometric plots. And I wanted the question of whether or not the protagonist underwent much change to remain open, for the novel to refuse any easy closure in that sense.

Which poet do you wish had written prose and why?

I can't think of a poet I really admire who didn't write at least some prose-even if the prose we have is primarily correspondence. That's an interesting fact I'd never thought about before your question. I can think of several prose writers I wish had never written poetry!

Who are your favourite experimentors with fiction writing today?

I think any serious writer is an 'experimentor' even if they are experimenting within what appears to be a more traditional mode. Isn't, say, Hilary Mantel experimenting with the historical novel as a form? Currently I'm reading great works of fiction (although they are works of fiction that often contest the category of 'fiction') by Gerard Murnane, Sheila Heti, Keith Waldrop, Javier Marias, and Clarice Lispector (she's not writing today, but the translations just issued by New Directions are terrific).  

Ben Lerner
Leaving Atrocha Station (Granta)